Turns out App.net currently has approximately 20,000 users, of which a small minority seemingly dominates the conversation: Basch estimates that 250 users (1.25 percent) have so far accounted for half the posts.

To put things in perspective: App.net surpassed its funding target ($500,000) by raising $803,000 from 12,315 backers – which means a lot more people signed up for the service after the highly visible fundraising period.

To date, App.net users have generated a little over 300,000 posts so far, although we should note a bunch of those are automated cross-posts from Twitter.

The average post length is about 100 characters.

As Basch points out, there’s already a decent amount of applications supporting App.net, as many of the early users are developers themselves.

A post on App.net is similar to a tweet, but users can post messages with up to 256 characters instead of 140 characters like Twitter.

Interesting stats for sure: 20,000 users is really not that bad for a fledgling service you need to pay for. It would be foolish to expect tens of thousands of people flocking to a new service that – let’s be honest – doesn’t solve a problem that hasn’t been tackled before. At least not yet.

However, I would have expected that the majority of the activity would come from far more users than the 250 users that account for half the posts to date.

It is, of course, early days and App.net is in ongoing development, so perhaps the percentage of active users will steadily increase in the future as it grows.